Only after I had written some complaints about the historical setup for the LZ Blue scenario, I realized that I’d downloaded a user remake for that battle some time back.

The modified LZ Blue is called The Battle for Hill 43. The scenario clock shows it starting at 7AM which, like the original scenario, is at the time of the initial landings. What the scenario actually depicts, however, is action that took place later in the morning. Perhaps close to 10AM.

When Company H* landed they were unaware that they were within the area held by a battalion of Viet Cong. Taking fire from multiple directions the company commander, 1st Lieutenant Homer Jenkins, ordered his platoons to separately attack in multiple directions so as to quickly secure the landing zone. Despite some initial success attacks on Hill 43 and Nam Yen (3) became bogged down. Jenkins decided to regroup and concentrate his forces on the threat to his rear, Hill 43, from which the majority of enemy fire was coming.

Ironically, the decision to regroup and cover that withdrawal with an artillery strike, a sound tactical decision I think, was part of the problem with linking up with Company I on the right flank. The less-than-perfectly-accurate artillery fire came too close to the advancing Company I and wounded two marines near An Cuong (2).

The assault on Hill 43 begins.

By mid-morning, Company H was now supported by armored vehicles and made a concentrated assault on Hill 43 and was this time successful.

This revised scenario has a roughly-accurate order-of-battle and a proper time scale for the assault depicted. The drawback is that, unlike the original, there isn’t room for maneuver. The fight is a rather straight-forward advance up the hill toward the three victory locations at its top. While 12 turns isn’t a short scenario, by Squad Battles standards, dismounted infantry advancing under fire need nearly all of that time to make it to and engage the victory locations. Tactics come down to the rather complex lines of sight covering the approaches to the hill.

It is fortunately for me that there are those who don’t just complain about the game’s shortcomings but actually do something to fix them.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or move on to the next article, for a look at one more strategic level version of the Vietnam War, as depicted in TOAW.

*I had some extended discussion about the units involved in the original Landing Zone Blue scenario. Important here is that, while Companies H and I were assigned adjacent zones in the attack, they were from different parent formations.

Like the Marine Corps, the Army has also been producing “pamphlets” to present their scholarship on the Vietnam War in a form easily digestible by the public. In this case, I’m looking at a five-part series titled Campaigns of the Vietnam War. Specifically, I’ve just finished reading the first two. Deepening Involvement, 1945-1965 summarizes the history of American’s participation in the post-World-War-II conflict in Vietnam as they, first, assisted and then replaced the French in fighting the communists in that country. It takes the reader up to the point where the U.S. began deploying full formations to South Vietnam and actively and directly fighting the insurgency. Buying Time, 1965-1966 describes the escalation involved in those deployments and gives a good overview of, not only the military actions through the early part of 1966, but the non-military initiatives that were also ongoing.

There’s not too much to say about these books. Like the Operation Starlite pamphlet, they are brief, easily read, and informative. On top of that, the books are also free (if you download an eBook from the link) and fairly inexpensive (if you purchase a hardcopy from the government.)

I do wish I’d come across these books at the beginning of my journey. The quick and comprehensive overview helps to get the details into perspective, much as the Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations scenarios has done for me in game format.

One piece of insight that I hadn’t considered before was the economic impacts of military aid. As the U.S. ramped up military participation through 1965, there were a number of factors that limited the speed of that escalation. General Westmoreland had done a clear analysis and requested the resources he felt were necessary to prevail in Vietnam. Was Johnson’s failure to provide those resources, as promised, in a timely fashion responsible for the ultimate loss of South Vietnam to the communists? Johnson, having run as a peace candidate, was not willing to risk his “Great Society” reforms by certain actions (calling up reserves, extending enlistments) that, had he done them, would have allowed him to fulfill the troop requests promptly. This was not, however, the only brake on the speed of deployment. Economic factors came into play.

In parallel with the direct military involvement, the U.S. provided aid, both military and non-military. The “stimulus” resulting from the combination of massive influxes of foreign money and the arrival of young Americans with wallets full of dollars had a tremendous inflationary effect. Inflation, in turn, contributed to dissatisfaction with the South Vietnamese government, directly undermining the purpose of the troops and aid that was flowing in. Economic advisors realized that the South Vietnamese economy had a limited capacity to absorb the influx of American troops and policy was adjusted accordingly.

It is interesting that in othercontexts I would question, if not criticize, the lavishing of aid on an impoverished country. Yet when it comes to Vietnam, the logic of providing economic, rather than military, assistance would seem enlightened. I hadn’t thought of the unintended consequences. We never do, do we?

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or move on to the next article, for a second look at LZ Blue during Operation Starlite.

Netflix is planning a vast purge of vampire movies, slated for the end of the year. Some I’ve already seen but will watch one more time while I can. Others I’ve never seen before. Even more, there just won’t be time to view before they all disappear.

First up on my viewing list was Interview with the Vampire, which I think I saw in the theater when it came out. I haven’t watched it again since, and didn’t exactly rank it as a film classic after I saw it. It did, however, get me reading the novels.

Interview with the Vampire was written in 1976. This was well before it was cool to be a vampire in the 1980s. So does this mean Anne Rice start the vampire-chic craze among goths? Probably not. The second book (The Vampire Lestat*) took nine more years to come to fruition and was more in line with the cool vampire subculture. In Interview, Louis obviously considers vampires to be evil rather than cool, heroic, or aspirational. Those who long to join the ranks of vampires are shown to be misguided, tragic figures. Rice wrote the book while coping with the loss of her own child, and so it is a very different, rather nihilistic, vibe compared to the books that would follow. Still, the vampires are shown to be beautiful, powerful, and (of course) sexy.

By 1994, when the film was made, the beautiful, sexy vampire thing had been pretty solidly established. Thus the decision to choose Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt for the dual leads in the film. Again, some context is useful here. Tom Cruise was near his box-office-draw peak. This movie is seated between A Few Good Men and The Firm, just before, and Mission Impossible and Jerry Maguire, just after. Cruise is seen as the name that will guarantee box office success. Pitt, on the other hand, was well before his status as a Hollywood icon became established. He had Thema and Louise and A River Runs Through It behind him but, to my recollection, he was known mostly as a pretty face. For me, it would take 12 Monkeys for me to start to appreciate any acting talent, and that would come until a year later. In Interview with a Vampire, he shows some of his future star power, but mostly looks sad and pretty.

Neflix has insisted that I should also rewatch Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I have not yet decided whether or not to indulge them. This movie came out two years before Interview and I also watched it when it hit the theaters. At the time, I assume that Coppola could do no wrong and the idea of a “serious” interpretation of the original work really appealed to me. When I eventually watched it, it was a little too over-the-top stylized for me. I have to admit that, years before that, I made an attempt at reading the original Dracula and got tripped up by the style in which it was written. This all leaves me unqualified to comment on the quality of the interpretation besides my own enjoyment.

Interview with a Vampire sequel The Queen of the Damned is also on the pull-list, but I’ll be Damned if I watch that again. For those blissfully unaware of its existence, it is a movie which mixes the stories from The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned to create a silly mess.

What I had never seen, up until the threat of removal forced my hand, was Blade. This was an action movie staring Wesley Snipes, one that I remember well when it was released but for a combination of reasons never grabbed me.

What I didn’t know was that this film was taken from a comic book series, where the character was initially introduced in 1973. Created in the odd regulatory web of American comics, Blade first appeared in Vampire Tales which, being technically a “magazine” and not a “comic book,” could be darker and feature violence, profanity, and nudity (to a point) that would never fly in Superman. Blade was one of the earlier** film presentations of a “dark” comic book themed character and, in fact, was only Marvel’s second conversion of its intellectual property to the big screen. The first was the 1986 Howard the Duck, an experience that Marvel and, indeed, all of us would probably rather forget. Given that, Blade was the first successful presentation of a Marvel comic book character on the big screen.

As a movie experience, it is not bad but it is hard to see much in the way of greatness here. Snipes has a good screen presence and Stephen Dorff*** does a good job with the villain. At its heart, I call in a martial arts movie with a supernatural twist rather than the reverse and I’ve never been that in the the martial arts genre.

As I’m watching, though, I start to notice first a familiar feel and then a déjà vu emanating from my multiple viewings of The Matrix. Obviously there is going to be some similarities with the dark, leather-clad leading figure dispatching enemy hordes through a mastery of weaponry and martial arts. Beyond the incidental, though, there are scenes that nearly identical between Blade and The Matrix. The most obvious to me was the one where the respective heroes enter the ground floor of an office high-rise and are met by the SWAT-team-styled minions of the bad guys. There are a handful of such scenes that are remarkably similar.

Naturally my first instinct was that Blade was either ripping off or paying tribute to The Matrix. Then I checked the dates. Blade preceded The Matrix by 7-8 months. Clearly if anyone did the borrowing, it was the The Wachowski Brothers. Thing is, the short time between the two releases makes it unlikely there was time to outright copy Blade. I foresee a future project for me; attempting to find the common root of those common scenes.

**It followed nearly a decade after Tim Burton’s The Dark Knight -inspired Batman feature film, so there is really no claim on innovation here. Still, at the time, I see it more as the exception rather than, as is now, the norm.

***Occasionally I see him in a movie. Each time I do, it always surprises me that he’s not been in bigger roles than he has been. I wonder why.

Of all the tactical-scale scenarios on Vietnam, the LZ X-Ray battles were always my favorite. One obvious reason is that we have, courtesy of Mel Gibson, a nicely vivid visual representation to connect to. Like Mel, the various scenario builders who have tackled this battle with one engine or another have Hal Moore’s book as a source. There is also the U.S. Army publication Seven Firefights in Vietnam, which was written during the war itself. Enthusiasts have the ability to create very detailed and accurate reconstructions of this battle without an inordinate amount of primary-source research.

For my first step, I returned again to Air Assault Task Force. I had a beast of a time getting it to work for the Battle of Mogadishu. Eventually I got it to do something and I hoped that my experience would improve when it came to other battles in this package.

The game, as distributed, includes a four-scenario version of the Battle at LZ X-Ray, each covering a multi-hour snippet over the several days of fighting. One somewhat-unique feature of this package is that it builds the scenarios over scanned maps of the battlefield so as to provide realistic and accurate terrain. In this case, the game map stretches from the 1st Cavalry staging point at Plei Me, through the fire base at LZ Falcon, onto the area of the battle. Part of the challenge is to manage and coordinate helicopter insertion and resupply across that long stretch of jungle.

First wave of landings inbound, I prep the LZ with artillery fire. In contrast to much of the UI, fire mission plotting works fairly well.

Immediately, I’m frustrated by the UI in this game. The game’s first scenario begins with the 1st Cavalry elements on the ground at Plei Me and the helicopter transport and gunships nearby, ready for action. This means that the first order of business is to get the infantry loaded onto the helicopters.

Good luck with that, eh?

As I described in that last article, the insertion mission just doesn’t seem to work for me at all. Manually loading the troops also wouldn’t work. Finally, in desperation, I switched between the multiple versions of this system that I own (namely the newer, but horrific UI, of Air Assault Task Force and its predecessor, The Star and the Crescent). What I found was that, using Air Assault Task Force, I could successfully order the infantry to load up onto the helicopters. I could then save and load back into The Star in the Crescent to manually order my troops to the landing zone.

Flush with success, I sent my helicopters back to pick up more troops and ordered my initial company into a defensive position. The scale of the game doesn’t encourage micromanagement of tactical position. In fact, my initial positioning attempts, for some reason had them wandering off to the north, into the jungle. Hoping to make use of the game engine as it was intended, I gave them the mission “Support by Fire,” to try to get them into the proper defensive position while they waited for reinforcements to arrive. Big mistake.

My AI subordinates are deranged. Or treasonous.

The system decided that the best way to accomplish such a support mission was to march, on foot, all the way back to Plei Me then turn around, march all the way back to the a position in the jungle near the landing zone and then… well, who knows what would happen then, the scenario would have timed out. I’ll point out that I am explicitly trying to defend the cleared area where I will be unloading my helicopters. Even reproducing this bizarre situation is difficult but what appears to have happened is that, because of the limited capacity of my helicopter transport, I’ve split the command that I gave the order to and so the engine’s first order of business is to reunite the command before moving into position.

Reload, try again. My second insertion is complete, but I don’t think they brought any soldiers with them this time. Too bad, the enemy is here.

After reloading and reissuing all the orders, my initial elements appear to be in a defensive position at the landing zone. While the graphics show them to be standing around in a cluster, their status is actually “defilade.” It also appears that all I’ve got there is a company commander and a weapons platoon. When I tried to bring in another group of troopers, everything seemed to go as before, but it looks like the helicopters arrived empty (screenshot immediately above).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It baffles me as to how this game has survived to this day is this state. My only guess is that with a saintly amount of perseverance, one can learn to overcome the UI and get the game to do something close to what was intended. Once one puts that amount of effort into it, perhaps there is pleasure to be derived from the game. It is hard to see wasting so much time, though, when moves have me wondering whether helicopters are going to unload units or they have once again shown up empty.

Lt. Col. Moore has set up a headquarters and directs his troopers into position.

Contrast this with a very similar scenario in Steel Panthers. In this scenario also, the clock begins with the 1st Cavalry troopers at Plei Me, ready to be transported, but this time with the first wave embarked. While the map isn’t actually to scale, there is a wide distance between the base and the landing zone, requiring 2 to 3 turns for transport. The victory hexes are awarded largely for gaining control of the landing zone, although there are several more to the west of the LZ. Presumably these additional points represent Lt. Col. Moore’s actual task, which was a search and destroy against suspected enemy positions just beyond his landing site. It wasn’t until after landing that he realized he was fighting a defensive battle against a vastly superior (numerically) force.

As I played this scenario all the way through, my biggest regret came in that opening move. The initial set up not only has the first load of infantry mounted on helicopters but the artillery are loaded-up and waiting at Plei Me also. This is a bit of a departure from reality as one of the LZ Falcon artillery batteries had been in position already for days. The second was to be set-up that morning but planned to land well ahead of the infantry insertion. Not quite realizing what I was dealing with, my artillery was put into place simultaneously with the first infantry landing in LZ X-Ray. I’m quite sure that it didn’t make any difference in the outcome, but I feel cheated not being able to “prep” the landing site with an artillery barrage. That felt import to me.

I also felt the game took a cheap shot at me [SPOILER WARNING – FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH]. There are snipers positioned to hit the in-bound choppers. I didn’t loose anybody to them, but a couple of hits meant that my helicopter “retreated” from the map without having unloaded its troops. The position of the snipers is in a place, and I’ll give it away without being explicit, where the lazy player will get shot up. Problem is, I’m pretty lazy. So even having lost a couple of transports, I continued flying into the same (or at least similar) traps because I wanted to save myself some mouse clicks. Point is, I feel a little cheated in that I was being punished for trying to cut down on the clicking. More clicking is not better gameplay.

Overall, this was a positive scenario from the realism perspective. This wasn’t a precise simulation, but it does tackle the portion of this battle that fit within the limits of the Steel Panthers engine, namely that first hour-and-a-half. It may not, however, be the most interesting part of the battle. While landing, the American forces were slowly realizing the quantity of enemy they faced. This scenario has an unknown quantity and position of the enemy facing you and, certainly, if you push out too rapidly from the landing zone you’re going start suffering losses. The length of the scenario doesn’t give you time for the full encounter to develop and, admirably, the scenario developer didn’t try to squeeze the extras in.

For that we go to Squad Battles.

Squad Battles: Tour of Duty has a LZ X-Ray scenario (as well as an LZ Albany one, which I’ll get to later). Its purpose is, apparently, to capture the moment of the battle where the first three cavalry companies have landed and have the player fend of the initial NVA assaults. With this in mind, there are no helicopter insertions over the course of the scenario. Also, and disappointingly for me, there is no off-board fire-support either from LZ Falcon, from close air support, or from helicopter gunships. This means that the player has only the support from the battalion’s mortar company in addition to direct fire. Furthermore, that direct fire is typically only against adjacent units. This is another scenario set in dense foliage where it is rare to be able to spot enemies across more than one hex.

The Lost Platoon is in serious trouble. Can I get them back in time? No.

All of this means we are looking at what I’ve described before as a typical Squad Battles scenario. The choices are few and you’re already in control of the objectives, so there is little in the way of maneuver that makes sense. The biggest choice is the “lost platoon” and the extent to which you try to rescue it. I probably took something close to the historical path in that I made an attempt to get to it and then stopped when I realized that I couldn’t do it. For what its worth (and, hopefully, not ruining the scenario for anyone), failing to rescue the lost platoon, losing it in its entirety plus incurring casualties among the rescuers; this still gave me a decisive victory. Point being, this isn’t a scenario where you have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something that was deemed impossible in the real fight. Simply not being overrun, apparently, counts as a win.

As far as the Tour of Duty scenarios go, this one is average. Average in both size and scope as well as in game play. While it is pretty hemmed in, it doesn’t have quite the frustration level of the “take these three victory locations in six moves” scenarios. Still, given my expectations for this battle, I’ve come away from this one extra disappointed.

There is another LZ X-Ray scenario, one built by an end-user, that I played many years ago. Sadly, it seems to have been lost in the shuffling of website ownership (it used to be stored at wargamer.com when Wargamer archived scenario files). I must have the file on an old hard disk somewhere around here but, up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth booting up old systems to try to find it. It’s a shame to see this stuff vanish from the internet so arbitrarily, especially as cloud storage becomes ever more available.

In this one, the focus is more on that “broken arrow” moment of the battle; the point when things were at their worst and the maximal air power and fire support that the Americans could muster was brought down around their defensive perimeter. Titled LZ X-Ray – First Contact, it struck me as a truly “fun” scenario in a ways that the above version was not. I’m not sure if it is really much of a challenge from the U.S. side, but you sure get to control a lot of firepower. As a challenging fight, it may be more interesting from the Commie side, trying to get your soldiers to survive the American rain of fire, but I never tried it that way.

If I ever find that file intact, I’ll let you know.

The situation on November 17th. This doesn’t look like what was in Moore’s book.

By way of contrast, I include for you another screenshot of my Ia Drang ’65 scenario, this time where the clock has advanced to the point where the U.S. has seized initiative and what would be the assault on LZ X-Ray. What we see, instead of a recreation of the historical battle, is a typical TOAW scenario. The forces spread out across the map trying to maintain cohesive lines while simultaneously cutting off and isolating the enemy. Engagements are somewhat limited by the scenario’s withdrawl schedule, but the engine would seem to encourage continuous attack right up until the time limit runs out, so as not to leave any victory points on the table. At least that’s the way I and my computer opponent are playing it.

What should have happened just before X-Ray, I found out by reading Seven Firefights in Vietnam, was that the NVA was regrouping for another shot at Plei Me, likely to take place within a few turns had the U.S. not took the fight to them. Communist forces were largely idle, preparing themselves for their own attack. Likewise, the 1st Calvary units were moving about the map trying to find an elusive enemy, not perpetually engaging them as they retreated or counter-attacked. This lead to a period of relative quiet between the breaking up of the attack on Plei Me and the three days of fighting over the landing zone.

Seven Firefights in Vietnam is, as I said, another reason why this battle gets the simulation love that it has. Reading it, as I did, well after reading We Were Soldiers Once…, it can feel somewhat anticlimactic, but certainly not a complete waste of time. Seven Firefights is but a chapter in a book that’s only 150+ pages total, so you know its going to not have the depth of the later work. It also focus on tactics. It was meant to be a learning tool for the professional soldier about a war that was still ongoing. Moore’s book, by contrast, is in part a tribute to the fallen soldiers of the battle and the war and tends to have a lot more focus on the personal rather than just tactics and command.

OK. So this is … unique.

Seven Firefights is a nice, easily digestible account of the battle that is made all the better by the fact that is available for free as a electronic book. While mostly encompassed by newer accounts, it still gave me some unique insights into the fight.

Speaking of available for free, the website for the book has battle animations that illustrate the fight in a way superior to most other attempts that I’ve seen. Again, very valuable for helping to all that happened over those three days into a proper perspective.

Netflix is removing It Follows from its streaming this month. This is a 2015 horror movie that got better-than-average (for the genre) critical praise. It was fairly low budget ($1-2 million), so the $23 million it pulled in meant for a pretty substantial profit.

I’ve never been much of a horror fan, so I’m not here to discuss the content so much. It wasn’t a bad movie. Personally, I appreciate all attempts to break out of the movie-making mold, so this one’s got the low-budget, independent thing doing it for me.

First impression came from it being filmed in Detroit. It took me a while to actually place the location, although it becomes obvious by the end of the movie. Even from the opening scenes it is clear that this isn’t California. The suburbia of It Follows is not the typical background of your Hollywood films. Everything is a bit run-down and cheap, despite the fact that the movie is about kids who are not poor. They have cars, homes, and plenty of leisure time. The older ones attend college.

It may be a representation of the middle class of fly-over America, one that has considerably less than the well-to-do coasts. It also have something to do with placement of this movie in time. Much of the decor is 70s or 80s. Cars, televisions, and telephones are all from a many decades ago. Mixed in, however, are some more modern artifacts. In the opening sequence, a character uses a cellphone to leave a message for her family. Is this an attempt to set the movie a generation or two back? Is it an attempt to portray visually the decay of Detroit? This might be another way to interpret this undercurrent of poverty. It is a representation, not of America overall, but of the very specific post-American dream Detroit.

Detroit may not be the focus of the movie but it is definitely a strong backdrop within it. What is the focus of the movie is the sexuality.

The writer/directory (David Robert Mitchell) has said that the genesis of the film’s plot came from a recurring nightmare he had as a child. A nightmare wherein he was followed by some unnamed horror. The sexual idea came as he was developing this “terror” into a film, first as an idea that the curse could be passed from person to person and then as a plot point of its own. Some film critics have speculated that the “follower” may represent AIDS/HIV or some other sexually transmitted disease. Others have wondered if it isn’t about sexual stigma itself; perhaps representing the stigma that sexuality has in our culture.

The director himself has been coy as far as divulging his intended symbology. While clearly intending some deeper meaning with the juxtaposition of sex and death, he has not acknowledged a direct, symbolic relationship between the supernatural tormentor and the sex acts which precede it.

Personally, I do see it as representing the the subconscious guilt that comes from casual sexual relationships. There is a certain contradiction here. Whether it is a result of the state of our current culture or a very subtle commentary upon it, that is the question.

In today’s society, we are largely taught that sex should be guilt-free. It’s natural, it’s positive, and it should be enjoyed as a part of what makes us human. Admonitions to be “safe” and have “consent” are tossed in to mitigate the obvious downsides. Yet I think nearly anyone can attest that the feelings of shame that accompany casual sex or one-night stands or sexual relationships where one participant is seen to “use” the other sexually; all these produce strong, primal reactions. While we interpret these as patriarchal prudery of a past generation, it may be something more integral to our beings. There are, of course, real risks involving unwanted pregnancy, disease, or simply unrequited emotional attachments. These things can be mitigated, but they don’t go away.

To me, the “it” that “follows” connects to that feeling, that knowledge, that your sex-without-love was something that you shouldn’t have done. This creates the contradiction. The characters themselves have no such hangups, no such guilt or shame. Whatever struggles the main character goes through regarding her supernatural curse, second thoughts about the sexual acts themselves don’t seem to be a part of it. Promiscuity, to a greater or lesser extent, doesn’t seem to cause any problems either socially or personally within the movie.

Is the film oblivious to this contradiction or, by presenting it as a big disconnect, is it trying to emphasize this exact point? Does it even matter? Sometimes a film can transcend the vision of even those who made it and, even if the filmmaker didn’t intend for this to be his theme, we in the audience can still take away from it what we will.

Whether intended or not, this theme does expose the conflict of our culture. There is this inherent conflict between the blind desire that drives us toward sex and the ambivalence and even regret that follows (see how that works). Modern politically-correct thinking is trying to square this circle and is having some difficulty. Should we be free and proud with our sexuality and reject the stigma of concepts like “slutiness” as tyrannies of a past age? Or does that post-coital depression tell us (particularly if we are women) that all sex is rape? Coming up with a set of rules that cover that whole gamut is bound to produce absurdity. Feminism seemingly embraces, simultaneously, an any-thing-goes debauchery of female sexuality next to a new puritanism for the men. It is internally inconsistent and surely is even more confusing for today’s youth than even the confusing sexual signals from culture’s past.

Even as we’re told to love promiscuity, something deep inside of us rejects and even hates it.

Although I had made a note to myself to look up the Squad Battles: Vietnam scenario that took place during Operation Starlite, when it came time to do it, I forgot.

The scenario called The Battle at LZ Blue takes place during Operation Starlite and covers some of the worst fighting of the entire operation, near the Viet Cong entrenched positions on Hill 23. The Marine infantry company tasked to land at the southern-most landing zones (designated Red, White, and Blue) found that their landing areas were coming under fire, with enemies both to their front and their rear.

A hot LZ, but the real one this time. The map leaves selection of LZ-Blue up to the player.

In contrast to the Steel Panthersmap, this one seems to get the scales (time and distance) accurate, as well as the size of the forces engaged. The scenario runs for about an hour-and-a-half, starting with landings at LZ Blue. At the same time, not far to the east, a Marine infantry company, having landed at Green Beach, is accompanied by a mix of armored fighting vehicles. Objectives have been marked within their combined area of operation and the player is free to mix and match these forces so as to best take all the objectives within the allotted time.

Although this setup is much closer to being historically accurate, the fighting is, nevertheless, compressed to fit into the available number of turns. The setup also encourages more coordination than, I think, could possibly have taken place during the actual battle.

As I try to compare the scope of the computer battle with the historical ebb and flow, I find that The Battle at LZ Blue has renamed all of the units. I think a big part of this is that Squad Battles has a policy of not using real names in their stock scenarios. It was felt that the possibility of Vietnam War veterans who might either a) come across their own names in a scenario or, perhaps worse, b) come across the name of a fallen friend in a scenario would be disrespectful and best avoided.

Armor from the amphibious landing is on its way to help the helicopter troops out of a tight spot.

But Squad Battles goes a step farther. Despite the rather obvious connection between small unit actions and the forces they involved, the stock scenarios (mostly, always? I haven’t done a comprehensive check) rename the units themselves. In this case, the company tasked with securing Landing Zone Blue and then taking Nam Yen was Company H of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, 3rd Marine Division. To their immediate east was the sector of Company I of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, who had made an amphibious landing. Despite the consecutive letters designating these two units, they hold very different places in the chain of command. It is true that as the first day of battle progressed, Company I mixed with armor from the landing and one platoon from Company H, owing to the difficulties they faced in their sector. This wasn’t, however, because they shared a common battalion commander.

So contrast the real situation for how it is set up in The Battle at LZ Blue. The order of battle employs two infantry companies, E and F, both of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment. Historically, the 14th was not even in Vietnam. Furthermore, placing all of the scenario’s infantry within the same battalion provides a coordination of commands (there is a Lieutenant Colonel represented in the game which is superior to all infantry units) that shouldn’t exist. One explanation may be the that “attaching” platoons outside their chains of command is not possible within the Squad Battles ruleset and this structure allows that fictional Lt. Col. to bridge the gap.

As Squad Battles scenarios go, this one is very big and very expansive. However, by allowing the mixing of several different units over fairly focused objectives in a short period of time, the resultant battle will necessarily be far less chaotic than the reality. The real Company H, upon landing, realized that it had unexpected enemy on its rear and launched its initial attack in the opposite direction from plan. By the time they began working towards their initial objective, they had already sustained casualties. Delays meant units weren’t where they were supposed to be and enemy units still occupied zones that should have been cleared.

Now, the fact that I can analyze what’s wrong with this scenario in such detail is itself a testimonial to how much more fidelity this has than the Steel Panthers version. When playing Steel Panthers, I lamented that there could have been battles, subsets of the operation, modeled correctly to scale. Instead, the game tried to shrink the entire battle into the engine’s parameters. Here we see an example of just what I was talking about. One of the more dramatic sections of the battlefield is isolated and modeled close to the correct scale. As before, we are mixing up something like six hours worth of fighting into a little more than an hour of game action, but that is probably necessary to provide a complete “story” with the scenario.

The result defies some Squad Battles‘ weaknesses. Being so much bigger than the typical fight, the player isn’t hemmed in to a single course of action. Particularly with helicopters and AmTracs at your disposal, you could probably hit all the objectives in almost any order you want. The lack of opponent AI is mitigated by the fact that they are placed in defensive positions to guard nearby victory locations. Little is required of them except that they shoot at you when you approach.

That said, in stark contrast to the battle portrayed, the scenario seems fairly easy to win. The real Company H fought well throughout the day but, in the end, returned to Landing Zone Blue without taking their objectives. This was no failure; their objectives were likely untenable given the unexpected location of enemy, particularly those on the wrong side of their landing location. Given this, how meaningful is The Battle at LZ Blue as a lesson about the actual battle? Or is this perhaps just a somewhat-more-accurate version of the Steel Panthers versions, giving the player a chance to mess around with a combination of helicopters and amphibious vehicles in a situation that resembles the reality?

I wrapped up my discussion of the Steel Panthers scenario with a thoughts on the artillery woes during the first day of Operation Starlite. I’ll do the same here. Notably lacking in Squad Battles: Vietnam is the massive artillery support which was available to Americans (in this and many of the other Squad Battles scenarios). The end of the fighting for Company H, indeed, involved the calling in of artillery and airstrikes onto the VC positions as the Americans withdrew. Yet in this scenario, there is no off-board artillery (or on-board, for that matter) and no air support. Again, it probably doesn’t pay to speculate too far on why the designer did not include it. The peculiarities of the artillery support that day may not have fit the model of artillery in Squad Battles. It may be that, having already made the scenario “winnable” by isolating the battlefield, throwing in huge amounts of artillery support would have been pointless. Whatever the case, I do feel that I’m missing out on one of the defining features of this fight.

Coming, this week, off of Netflix is the 2016 film Masterminds. I’ve commented often about how Netflix’s policy has done me a favor, causing me to view a movie that I might otherwise have passed over. In this case, while I did enjoy Masterminds, I could probably have taken or left it.

To compare and contrast with the last movie I looked at, this one also wasn’t much of a success. It did manage to cover its production costs (some $30 million total against a $25 million budget), but not by a wide margin. Critically, the movie was not particularly appreciated. So unlike Jesse James, this isn’t a great movie that somehow was a mismatch with the Hollywood formula – it was a Hollywood formula, although I do think they screwed up even in that regard, at least somewhat.

The story is based on the real-life robbery of an armored car company vault after hours. At the time, it resulted in the second-largest cash haul by an American thief, second only to an armored car robbery perpetrated upon the very same company some months before. The facts of the crime, such as they are known, are farcical on their face. The concept of truth being stranger than fiction comes to mind, but Hollywood would beg to differ.

I think a large part of the problem with this movie is that it didn’t understand what it was trying to be. Clearly this concept wasn’t pitched as a true-crime docu-drama. It’s quite obviously meant to be a comedy, complete with the top box-office names to headline and bring in the bucks, per formula. Yet even those movies that lean heavily towards historical fact will often take dramatic liberties to make a better movie. So is that what we have here? Is this the crazy-but-true-story of a bank robbery gone stupid, just jazzed up a little for the big screen? If it is, I’d say on that basis it is somewhat successful.

After I watched the movie, I watched the trailer (for reasons I’ll get to in a bit). What I saw was a stock trailer for the typical mediocre movie, comedy version. The trailer takes all the funniest pieces of the movie and strings them together. The idea (per the marketing men) is that you think, “well that was pretty funny” and put up the price of the full movie not realizing, until after you’ve paid, that you’ve already seen all the best jokes. Granted I’d already seen the movie but I feel that, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t really want to watch it on the basis of that trailer.

Contrast to the way Netflix pushed it on me. Their algorithms say I like movies based on real events, so they gave me a thumbs-up on that basis. The intro, as you’re scrolling through the Netflix screens, has most of an early comedic scene between the main character and his love interest. They’re just talking, but not too seriously, about the possibility of robbing their employer. This is a nice setup – it both lets you know what the gist of the story is (accompanying text referenced the real-life robbery) and lets you know that it’s going to be a goofy comedy. It didn’t make me drop everything to want to watch it but I got the sense it would be something I’d like.

Now I’m a bit of a sucker for broad, physical comedy with a bit of elementary-school level “potty” humor thrown in. From what I can tell, I share this with the majority of American men. Bits of Masterminds really had me falling-out-of-my-chair laughing. Not that I’d recommend it for an Oscar, but it did make me laugh. I think the key to the success is that these bits of ridiculous absurdity are thrown into a story that, itself, has the added depth behind it of “these are actually real people who REALLY did do this stupid stuff!” Of course, half of it they really didn’t do – there are a lot of stereotypical redneck jabs tossed around that, almost certainly, have no factual basis. But the fact that there are real people behind it all makes it work.

Contrast that with the sucker who saw some really funny lines from Owen Wilson and figured, “I love Owen Wilson,” and so went to be entertained. Several reviewers complained that there just weren’t enough jokes. Certainly, I think if I were drawn in by that theatrical trailer only to realize I’d already seen all the jokes, I’d be of a similar opinion.

Given that the film made money, is this a marketing success or a marketing fail? Setting up false expectations means you’re more likely to disappoint but here the name of the game is getting the paying customers through the door. Is the genre they pitched more popular than the genre they actually made? If so, they may have played it right.

Speaking of making money, I’ll come back to why I was watching that trailer. There are a couple of songs in the soundtrack that were familiar-but-not-quite. This included a song used throughout, including opening and closing credits. I assumed it was an AC/DC song, but one I’d never heard. At the time I wanted to check on some of the characters, the combination of who played them along with the extent to which they matched real people. I got it in my head that it would be entertaining to listen to that song while I read. I began searching YouTube only to find that I could not locate such a song. When I did searches for the soundtrack as a whole, it turns out that several of the songs are absolutely scrubbed from the internet. Even if I look to buy a CD, Amazon seems only to sell a recording of the score, not the pop-songs that were used throughout the movie.

My best guess is it is a song written specifically for the movie by a “band” that makes its living writing songs for movie soundtracks.

This seems really strange to me. I can only imagine it is the collapse of some kind of deal to use the music rights beyond the theater release. I can understand that protecting your copyrights is necessary to protect your revenue stream from your creative works, but to make a song or two completely vanish is also no way to make money. At least that’s the way I see it.

Steel Panthers presents us with another “base defense” style scenario. In this one, it isn’t the base of the previous example, but rather an temporary defensive position that is part of a larger road clearing operation. By attempting to disrupt the operation and striking at the base, the local Viet Cong commander tried to grab a propaganda victory. He concentrating his forces on one element of the the U.S. operation and, in doing so, he thought he could defeat U.S. armor with his Viet Cong guerrillas.

Like that previous scenario, this one seems to be correctly scaled in terms of an accurate representation of the battle. Turnwise, this scenario lasts for 45 minutes out of what was several hours of battle. It also seems to represent only the initial portion of the Viet Cong assault and so seems to restrict the actions modeled to that portion of time. Once again, it seems a bit counter-intuitive to give the player the static-defense side of the scenario. Unlike the earlier one, though, there are only a couple of turns where the automatic defensive-fire becomes annoyingly extensive. One the scenario settles down, the turns become very playable.

Here they come.

Although this is a “user-made” scenario, the author of this one is long-time wargaming Veteran “Wild Bill” Wilder. The purpose of this creation is to demonstrate the effective use of armor in a war where deployment of armor units ran counter to doctrine. Seeing a name like this attached to a scenario makes me think of it more in terms of a “stock” scenario than a fan production.

The actual fight was another early engagement of the recently arriving units from America. The Third Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One) was in the area and high command wanted to see them tested in live operations. In the area north of Saigon, the ARVN units were hampered in their operations by Viet Cong ambushes, which would plague them as they attempted to move along the roads. This, in turn, prevented ARVN units (in this case, the 5th ARVN Division) from engaging and displacing the enemy. U.S. assistance was required to clear and secure Highway 13 for a pending 5th Division operation. Someone began referring to Highway 13 as “Thunder Road,” a name which would seem ever more appropriate as the war unfolded.

The site covered by the scenario was located central to the operation and thus provided a good location for artillery support (not represented in the scenario) and command elements for the operation. Units had been positioned there already for a day when they drew an Viet Cong dawn ambush on the morning of the 12th.

The scenario’s written introduction in Steel Panthers emphasizes the employment of maneuver and its role in the success of the American defense. Indeed, the time-period within this scenario concentrates on the initial dawn assault, which was repulsed by a series of armored-vehicle counter-charges.

Unfortunately, that’s not how I played it.

Never quite sure how Steel Panthers applies its defensive bonuses, I always figure that a moving unit is more vulnerable than a stationary unit and that this applies double when it comes to initial scenario positions. Furthermore, not knowing where the attack was coming from or how extensive it might be, it seemed most effective to use my units to neutralize the enemy attacks with fire to the greatest extent possible rather than move. While I lost some M113s in the chaos of the initial mortar barrage (historically, the enemy mortars were not effective), my gut feeling was backed by the fact that I tended to lose vehicles to enemy anti-tank teams only when I moved them. My early movements involved only pulling back to more defensible positions and only moved forward again to secure victory locations once the enemy attack was broken up.

I’m not sure if the U.S. command learned the lesson expounded in the scenario description, that armored units could be effective in Vietnam. However, I am pretty sure I did not learn the intended lesson. Tanks can be really good against infantry, especially if they can fight from well-supported positions on the defense and not be unduly exposed to anti-tank teams. Blind charges with armored vehicles against unseen and unknown enemies is generally not effective in Steel Panthers.

But about those tanks.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the scenario developer made a mistake when creating the order of battle for this one. At the Second Battle of Bàu Bàng, which would take place in March of 1967, Troop A (of a different Cavalry unit) had six M48 Patton tanks. From all the reading that I’ve done (though I’ve still got a source or two waiting to be read), Troop A of the 1st Squadron of the 4th Cavalry Regiment operated, on November 12th of 1965, only M113s, no tanks. The Viet Cong’s intelligence identified the armored personnel carriers (and some mortar carriers) as “tanks” (a mistake that continues to the here and now), but I don’t think any were actually there.

In my game, I found the M113s extremely vulnerable to hidden anti-tank positions and did, in fact, rely on the Pattons to dominate the battlefield. In real life, the initial M113 charge was a tremendous success, running off the Viet Cong attackers without the loss of a single vehicle.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article, which returns you to Operation Starlite for another tactical-level game.

For the Siege of Belgrade, the pitched battle was depicted by showing (effectively) still shots of the major characters accompanied by waves of blood splashing across the screen. It was not tasteful, nor pleasant.

I do give the show some credit, though. They tried to balance portrayal on screen of both the goings-on within the royal palace and with Suleiman and his court in the field. This requires somehow portraying a massive army on the march and huge battles, all on a TV-series budget. They did try.

The other effect that smacked me across the head is one that I’ve seen before in 80s shows (or maybe it was 90s. The Sharpe series is one that springs to mind). Magnificent Century‘s use of electric guitar to score a period drama is also not a good production choice. To me, it made the show seem at least 20 years older than it is.

I’m also surprised at how thoroughly the soap-opera plot has grabbed me. The episodes tend to have cliff-hanger endings, particularly when it comes to the conflicts between the various female main characters. I find myself craving to find out how the latest cat fight is going to turn out. It is embarrassing to admit it, but it is true.

I’m also continuing on withThe Pillars of The Earth, and this is a story that seems to snowball in intensity as a rolls along. Where I had started with reading a handful of pages at a go, I now find myself staying up to all hours to advance from chapter to chapter. I also notice the author pulling in more and more of the significant events of the time period, directly linking them to his narrative. Maybe a bit obviously, the White Ship plays an active role in the story.

In another part of the story, our hero finds himself working that the Toledo School of Translators, whose existence I only recently became aware by having watched The Day the Universe Changed. The flood of Greek scholarship that flowed from the completion of the Reconquista and the subsequent Western access to Muslim libraries is a tremendous event in the development of Western Civilization. It is also one that I really was unaware of until I saw it in the TV series. As The Pillars of the Earth wanders around Europe a bit, the story begins to feel every bigger and bigger.

Likewise I soldier on withBlood and Beauty. It may be a mistake to read this particular book intermittently. Each time I come back to it after reading something else, the disorientation of present-tense narrative returns in full force. As always, I get used to it after a while, but at first I feel less human for having read this style of prose.

As I get further into this book, I realize that details of Blood and Beauty and the details in Borgia come pretty close to each other. I don’t think one used the other as a source. Rather, I suspect that they both have relied on the same, or at least similar, contemporary histories. Even in some cases where the story is different, you can see how one has made a slightly different interpretation of the knowns and unknowns than the other. Who killed Juan Borgia? In Blood and Beauty, we know it is not Cesare because the narrative of the book has access to his inner thoughts. We also know it is not Lucrezia, because her motive (the killing of commoner and confidant Pedro) doesn’t occur until after the killing of Juan. In the book, however, it is clearly shown how history will fault Cesare once other bodies pile up. Once you start killing one of your own relatives, it stands to reason that you’d be willing to kill another.

One surprise in Blood and Beauty is the prominent featuring of syphilis to the story. It is particularly potent here, at least to me, because unlike the characters in the book we are aware of both its transmissible and its potentially fatal consequences. In the book, a surprising number of major characters struggle with the disease. On TV, they were merely made gay.